Working with Developers to Activate your Content Strategy
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Presented by Georgy Cohen at HighEdWeb 2019 When we’re talking about digital work, sometimes we divide that work into two buckets: the “creative” work (completed by visionary unicorns) and the “technical” work (completed by heads-down colleagues who just want to be left alone to code in peace). But this is inaccurate. The creative and technical aspects of digital work need to be aligned in order to create effective experiences. This is particularly true when we are talking about content strategy. In this talk, I will discuss how to practically achieve successful collaboration between creative and technical teams, yielding both an effective content strategy and deeper cross-disciplinary understanding. This means being more thoughtful about team dynamics and communication, requirements gathering, information design, the interplay between code and content, and overall site governance.
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Working with Developers to Activate your Content Strategy
- 1. Working with Developers to Activate Your Content Strategy Georgy Cohen (she/her) @radiofreegeorgy #heweb19
- 6. Who here works closely with the developers at your institution?
- 8. Last mile
- 9. An effective content strategy must be supported at all levels by the appropriate technological approach.
- 10. Having a content strategy can also guide smarter collaborative decision making
- 11. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Creatives ● Devs Old stereotypes
- 12. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Creatives ● Devs Old stereotypes
- 13. OHO INTERACTIVE Forging a partnership
- 14. Be advocates and champions for each other by building trust and relationships
- 15. https://pixabay.com/en/computer-internet-unhappy-user-1295358/ Ensure technical team’s work is sustainable and appropriate to their skills
- 16. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Cross-disciplinary listening & learning ● Collaboration and communication at both leadership and practitioner levels How we do it Forging a partnership
- 17. OHO INTERACTIVE Discovery & requirements gathering
- 18. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Connect devs to the purpose (and engage them in the definition) of their work, which is sometimes trickier to glean downstream Provide context
- 20. OHO INTERACTIVE Starting off on the right foot Discovery and requirements gathering
- 21. OHO INTERACTIVE ● CMS and associated modules/plugins ● Events calendars ● Social media integrations Smarter, collaborative software selection Discovery & requirements gathering
- 22. Content strategy goals + Technical requirements = Most appropriate solution
- 23. OHO INTERACTIVE UX & design
- 24. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Is this appropriate and sustainable in the context of the strategy? Questions in UX UX & design
- 25. OHO INTERACTIVE ● What is the technical feasibility and best path to implementation Questions in UX UX & design
- 33. ↑Content template excerpt ↑Annotation for developers (content model)
- 34. OHO INTERACTIVE A cautionary tale UX & design
- 35. OHO INTERACTIVE Dev impact on content effectiveness
- 39. Build your site for your users. All of your users.
- 40. Build your site for your users. All of your users.
- 41. Ultimately, the CMS is where an organization’s content strategy is executed. Rich Prowse Deputy Director, Service Design University of Bath
- 42. Eileen Webb, “Training the CMS” / A List Apart
- 46. Build your site for your users. All of your users.
- 47. Build your site for your users. All of your users.
- 48. OHO INTERACTIVE Workflow Governance Soft roles Hard roles Subject-matter expert Administrator Legal review Content editor Stakeholder Content manager
- 49. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Setting specific ownership or access for content types of certain strategic value. Defining content ownership Governance
- 50. OHO INTERACTIVE ● Govern access to technical systems such as CMS (by setting prerequisites) ● Define ownership of systems ● Establish process for use or integration of third-party applications Policies Governance
- 51. Build your site for your users. All of your users.
- 54. We are all problem solvers.
- 55. We are all problem solvers.Thank you! georgy@oho.com @radiofreegeorgy
Editor's Notes
- I actually bought this book once and thought about pursuing front end dev
- 2004 - I built this website to play with forms and CSS
- This was my last website build, from around 2010 for my friend’s burlesque troupe. I decided I wanted to learn how to do a WordPress install (this was obviously before I had a kid and thus had free time) The site got hit by hackers twice and I got way too acquainted with the htaccess file If anyone’s hiring a web designer, hit me up after the session
- Late 2010
- In my career I’ve always found that I have more success when I am working closely with a technical team
- The concept of the “last mile” - first learned about it in the context of humanitarian relief. It means that at the end of the day, you can marshal tons of food and millions of dollars to help an afflicted region, but if it can’t actually make it to the area and be used constructively, the entire effort is for naught.
- Or else it will fall short
- Creatives & Devs - old stereotype
- The more that comes from collaboration and less from a hand-off, the more certain is our success.
- Between your marketing group and your technical team, there will be different priorities as well as different personalities. Physical and literal distance - You may be in the same unit, or housed across campus, with the same VP or different one. You may see each other frequently, or rarely.
- No group is in service to the other Goal: Learn how you can best support one another Focus on understanding personalities, cultivating trust, and growing relationships
- Make sure not just your needs are being met, but that we are not creating technical headaches that will complicate efforts now or down the road Do decisions made in the creative process yield unsustainable technical approaches? Are technical staff tasked with making editorial decisions (e.g. defining a publishing workflow) or executing content tasks (e.g. writing button copy)
- VP Marcom and CIO should have a standing 1 on 1 Should have standing “ambassadorships” if on separate/distant teams to sustain practitioner-level relationships Sit in on a CMS training or dev team meeting and/or invite developers to an editorial meeting Host “Content Strategy 101” discussion
- Get everyone connected to the purpose of the work, and engage all team members in the definition of the work, at the outset of the project
- Developers can easily connect their work to the overarching goals and context in which the work is taking place. And content strategists can feel secure in understanding the feasibility of their solutions. For all, this awareness enhances the sense of purpose behind the work and shared investment in its success.
- Stay in step - stay in scope Get valuable technical perspective in defining solutions (e.g. workflow, taxonomy/reuse) Advance creative approach with front-end input/ideation
- Make smarter decisions together —> Technologists shouldn’t purchase publishing/marketing solutions (and marketers/publishers should not purchase software products) without consultation Working together to define requirements for these information-intensive pieces of publishing software will save time, money, and sanity, yielding a more effective end result
- “Does this achieve our goals? How much of a priority is this? Can this be implemented on schedule/budget? Do priorities need to shift or compromise? Do new considerations or requirements emerge? How do you balance these against one another?
- Content decisions about hierarchy and information architecture may directly inform technical implementation of making site elements required or optional or influence what options site authors have for managing content, for instance. The earlier you engage development resources in these conversations, the better.
- Content reuse - the origin thereof
- Structured content
- High level content model - map out overarching relationships between content types
- High level content model - map out overarching relationships between content types
- High level content model - map out overarching relationships between content types
- Share this - half a day for integration - theming, testing, etc. Don’t carelessly include things like this - they result in real time and scope and $$ to build and may not be necessary You can’t assume that just because it’s an embed, there’s no effort involved on your side Also does everyone understand what “embed” means (not the same as an API!)
- Accessibility & Site Performance: It doesn’t matter if you have the most well-written, well-designed, strategically aligned website in the world—if its performance is poor or accessibility is compromised, it is a major liability to your overall success.
- It can result from a combination of content factors (e.g. unoptimised images, inattentive copy) and technical factors (e.g. bloated code). - SEO considerations as well If your content loads slowly or choppily, presents poorly on mobile or via browser assistive technology, or cannot be found easily via search engines, site visitors will not have the opportunity or patience to view your content, grasp your message, and follow through on key actions.
- Accessibility is an overall digital publishing concern - requires holistic approach for best outcomes
- Event tracking is a powerful tool for determining at quite a granular level how people use our websites Ensuring the site is coded correctly to get the most out of event tracking and other analytics enhancement, to enable optimal content measurement against defined KPIs - Configure events that can illustrate how users engage with and take action on the site.
- Empowering content editors - A lot of that comes out through dev work As a content strategist, advocate for authors’ needs thru technical process
- Structured content
- Descriptive field names, help text and inline editorial guidelines, field sets/groups - making the flexibility to add this kind of stuff a CMS requirement
- Descriptive field names, help text and inline editorial guidelines, field sets/groups - making the flexibility to add this kind of stuff a CMS requirement
- Governance is really the sweet spot of partnership between content strategists and developers. When that partnership is healthy, the systems managed by those development teams reflect the hard-coded embodiment of policies that enforce accountability, workflow, and overall adherence to editorial strategy.
- Governance model - to align with our organization’s digital publishing needs and priorities Clarify at a high level the different groups involved in the publishing process and their relationships to one another
- By working together to translate the appropriate publishing roles and responsibilities into a workflow for web publishing, the system and the strategy can reinforce each other’s effectiveness. Developers can also, at this early stage, begin understanding the scope of publishing needs. Creating system roles and permissions -
- Publishing needs both hard & soft roles to succeed - they work together Creating system roles and permissions and publishing workflows that align with our organization’s digital publishing needs and priorities
- Could have technical implications in terms of roles & permissions
- Creating comprehensive training and documentation resources and modules that account for technical elements, strategic or brand context, and content best practice
- It’s not as much about learning how to code as it is in learning how to maintain a mutually beneficial partnership with developers
- Developers, after all, are technical strategists, problem-solving as much as we do in order to achieve their goals. By syncing our efforts, imagine what we can achieve.